Amenities, Affordability, and Housing Vouchers
An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by [...]
Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View
We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house [...]
Did the Introduction of Fixed-Rate Federal Deposit Insurance Increase Long-Term Bank Risk-Taking?
We investigate whether the introduction of fixed-price U.S. federal deposit insurance in 1933 increased the risk-taking of banks over the succeeding period. We examine 60 financial institutions and find that [...]
Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates
Previous literature has shown that land use regulations influence where people choose to live within the U.S. by impacting housing prices. In this paper, we study the impact of these [...]
The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes
The nation's 11.2 million extremely low income renter households account for 25.7% of all renter households and 9.5% of all households in the United States. The U.S. has a shortage [...]
Can the Market Multiply and Divide? Non-Proportional Thinking in Financial Markets
Nominal stock prices are arbitrary. Therefore, when evaluating how a piece of news should affect the price of a stock, rational investors should think in percentage rather than dollar terms. [...]
The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018
As the inaugural State of the Nation’s Housing report noted, the majority of Americans were well housed in 1988, and a number of metrics point to improving conditions since then. [...]
Innovative startup firms and the patent system
Patent protection is assumed to benefit entrepreneurs seeking investment, because patents signal quality and are an asset that can be resold if a startup fails. This column argues that the [...]
Shifting Neighborhoods
Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in [...]
The Marginal Effect of Government Mortgage Guarantees on Homeownership
The U.S. government guarantees a majority of residential mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper we use property-level data to estimate the effect [...]